Thomas Keightley

Irish writer and folklorist (1789–1872), born in Dublin and settled in London from 1824. He came to literature, by his own account, because his fortune was gone and ill health shut him out of the professions, and he lived by writing school histories. Helping T. Crofton Croker gather the Fairy Legends of the South of Ireland led him to write The Fairy Mythology (1828), the first attempt in English to set the fairy beliefs of Europe side by side. It was translated into German at once; Jacob Grimm wrote commending it. He is also, unusually for his century, a collector who admitted in print that some of the material he helped produce had been improved for effect.